What is Google Optical Character Recognition and its role in SEO?

In the earlier days, Google bots found it difficult to index the content PDF files that were especially not text-based. Now the times have changed as Google has introduced the OCR (Optical Character Recognition) technique to index the image based and the scanned documents. It is now easy for the Google bots to index any documents ranging from passport, invoice orders, analytical static data to Mails and receipts. Optical Character Recognition is a technique that uses electronic conversion to convert these documents into machine-coded text. This has allowed Google to closely index the documents as these documents available in PDF formats are very valuable. This has brought up some good changes to the search results as it is now easy to find the images of the search results with an enhanced option “View as HTML” that allows finding the text of the image through OCR.

Bringing in the OCR technique has opened the door for the views to access through a lot of documents from the search engine. Highly beneficial as these changes are, it is now to rethink the possibilities of the searcher to find a document that has been scanned and uploaded to the internet. Google’s OCR recognition technique now works for more than 250 languages, which makes it useful for searchers to find rare scanned documents from the internet. This technique also achieves to identify the language with an accuracy of 90% which makes it dependable to use.

Role of OCR (optical character recognition) in SEO

As Google has now started to convert the images into text and index them, thanks to OCR, it has valuable effects on how SEO shapes up to this arrangement. Even though including images in your website content can help in making your website more good looking and probably more useful to the customers, especially in case of showcasing your business products or the schematic diagrams or any representation that can generally be more relatable to the better understanding of the customer if represented through an image rather than texts, it is important to incorporate suitable title tags surrounding the image. This does not just help the bots to recognize the importance of such images but Google likes to have more text in your website content to provide an interactive bridge to the customer.

Making the text part more informative to the customer visiting the website with an improved website design and better usage of fonts can help to put a good visual presentation on the table for the viewers. Even if OCR can index through the images on the website, it is not guaranteed to do it completely. Having a good amount of text to represent the data to the customer by surrounding alt texts around the images can help the search bots to improve the crawl ability on the website.